The HTC One is rather odd. It has just two buttons. That’s home and back, with an HTC logo in the middle that we were told does nothing. But XDA has found something rather interesting with the logo/button. Some of the devs over at XDA went digging through the code and it seems that the HTC Logo can become a capacitive button since it falls into a touch-sensitive area. So in theory, you could map the HTC logo to be recents, menu, or anything else. Now it hasn’t been tried yet, so we’ll have to wait and see if it really works well or not.
The thread over at XDAis rapidly growing and it looks like you will need a custom kernel to enable that HTC logo as a button. I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon, since a mod like this is going to take some tinkering to get it to work. And the HTC One isn’t in that many peoples’ hands yet, it’ll be a bit before the magic starts to happen.
But hey, this is why we love Android. Having awesome developers go through every bit of code and see what they can do to customize a device to work better or just give the user more choices. I mean, just look at Paranoid Android, CyanogenMod, or any of the other ROMs out there. Who would have thought about using a navigation system like Pie? Or having your status bar and navigation bar change colors to match the scheme of the app that’s open? Isn’t the Android developer community pretty awesome? I’d have to say so. The only thing we may have to worry about is how many developers we’ll have working on the HTC One. Typically, HTC devices are kinda hard to unlock, root and develop for. So we’re hoping that changes with the HTC One.
How many of you are excited to map that HTC logo when you get your One? Let us know in the comments below.